The Lie of Life
by TheSummerNightingale
Summary: The year is 1350, and Perenelle Flamel is one of the many victims of the bubonic plague. Nicolas Flamel refuses to sit back and watch his love die. So instead, being the alchemist he is, he gets up and creates the Philosopher's stone.


**Written for Round 3 of the QFLC! And if you'll notice, all my fics for the competition have this book cover (which Daki, a.k.a. the amazing team captain of the Tutshill Tornados, made)! **

**Anyway, this round was about history and, for my position, a pandemic disease, so I chose the bubonic plague. It just so happened that Nicolas Flamel was around twenty at the time of Europe's first encounter with the plague. And this made me quite happy (to know that the events aligned! Not that Europe encountered the plague..), so I wrote about them all :D**

**Also written for the That's You! Challenge, for Sherlyn, hosted by Daki! **

**Hope you guys all enjoy :)**

* * *

When he was nineteen years old, Nicolas Flamel thought he was going to die, and he feared it like children fear foreign creatures and beasts derived from mythologies.

Admittedly, so did everyone else in the entirety of Europe, but that wasn't the point.

The _point _was that Nicolas thought he knew what true fear of death was, but he didn't, and he discovered that when he not-so-unexpectedly fell in love with Perenelle Ribaudiere, married and lived with her for two whole years until she caught the very thing that magical folk _should _have been able to prevent, but couldn't.

She got the Black Death.

That was about the point in time where Nicolas realized that he'd take on his death any day, if it meant that Perenelle could live. He'd lay down his armor, sacrifice his soul, and even shake hands with the devil, if it would save his love's life.

All of those were noble ideas, but Nicolas was a proud alchemist who liked to go beyond the norm, so while many others weeped for their dead or dying loved ones, Nicolas went ahead and created the Philosopher's stone.

Even if it was by accident.

* * *

_April 1, 1350_

"Perenelle, love." Nicolas kneeled by his wife's side, speaking no louder than a whisper. "Perenelle," he repeated more forcefully. "Perenelle!"

She did not reply.

From this angle, she almost appeared to be normal. There were no buboes, large sacs of pus and blood, on her face, which was framed with her wavy blonde hair. The rest of her body was covered with a sheet so that Nicolas would not accidently touch the few buboes under her armpits or on her neck.

But it was the expression on her face that clawed at Nicolas's heart and tore apart his soul. Every muscle from her jaw to her eyebrows was completely tense. From the small parting of her lips, it was evident that she was grinding her teeth together.

Perenelle was in heart-stopping agony, and Nicolas wanted more than anything for peace to relax her muscles once more, for a smile to playfully grace her face and light up her blue, blue eyes that he so loved and sorely missed.

"Perenelle." Her name escaped from his lips as a plead for her to wake. He knew it was not her time to die for at least a couple of days, since her skin had yet to turn black. Still, it had been two days since her infection, and Nicolas was terrified.

"Nic...olas?"

Nicolas watched eagerly as Perenelle's eyelids fluttered open tiredly. "Perenelle," he breathed out again, this time in the gratifying emotion of relief.

"Nicolas," Perenelle sighed back. She didn't move, but her eyes scrutinized every aspect of his face. "You look tired."

He burst into a fit of laughter, sinking down to the wooden floor of their cottage while repeatedly shaking his head.

"What?" Perenelle defensively asked in the sweet, clear voice Nicolas found to be endearing. "You do."

"You are the one with the plague," Nicolas said, and immediately his chuckles faded. "You are the one whose life is at risk."

His wife shot daggers at him with her eyes from her spot in bed. "Do not treat me with such sympathetic words! I am alive now, am I not?"

"Yes, yes, but of course," Nicolas murmured, though he didn't say that which both of them were thinking.

Perenelle smiled at him. "That's much better," she sighed, closing her eyes. There was a pause before she spoke again. "I feel as if-" Her eyes snapped open as she cut herself off with large, abrupt coughs followed by gasps of pain.

Nicolas instantly clambered up from the floor and frantically used the back of his hands to feel Perenelle's face as she coughed and struggled through obvious pain. Her skin was scalding hot. Panicking with only the thought of cooling her body down, he nimbly grabbed the edges of her sheets and pulled them down from her neck.

He toiled to keep in the initial bile and tears at seeing the pus-filled buboes. Somehow over the night, Perenelle had gained approximately ten more on her arm, thighs, and collarbone, adding to her grand total of around fourteen buboes.

His mother had died when her fifteenth buboe had festered up.

Nicolas pinched the edge of the sheet and lifted it over her body once more. He focused in on her face, where her forehead was lined with sweat and her cheeks shiny with tears. "Perenelle! Oh, sweet love, it will be over with soon," he said as calmly and soothingly as he could. "It's almost over. The pain's almost away."

He continued to whisper and stroke her hair until Perenelle's gasps receded to constant, heavy breaths. She shakily breathed out, "It's worse, isn't it?"

He wanted to lie. He wanted to say "no", and not just because he wanted her to believe it, but also because _he _wanted to believe it, _he _wanted to pretend that she was the same as ever, and _he _wanted to fool himself into thinking that she would, against all odds, survive.

But Perenelle was perceptive, and she was not a fool to any extent.

"Yes," Nicolas said. "Yes, my dear. Yes."

She nodded, the barest movement of her head. "I suspected."

They stayed in that position, Nicolas stroking her blonde hair while sitting on the edge of the bed, for what seemed like eternity and a second at the same time.

He'd never felt so hopeless. There did not seem to be anything for him to do. The best doctors in town were all useless - they were either dead, dying, or simply had no clue how to heal what was now expanding to be half of Europe's population. And nothing from his alchemy books he'd accumulated from his years at Beauxbatons gave any hint whatsoever to a remedy for this inevitable black death.

"Don't you dare." Perenelle's voice pierced through the hazy layers of his thoughts. "Don't you dare think about alchemy."

Nicolas couldn't help it; he rolled his eyes. "Love, I'm an alchemist."

She plowed on without regard to his words. "You can't use alchemy. It wouldn't be fair to the rest." She sighed. "Don't. Okay? Promise me." She started to draw her right arm out from under the blankets, but movement caused her to let out a long, heart-wrenching whimper. Perenelle glanced at him helplessly as she was forced to relaxed her arm below the sheets.

Nicolas placed his hand on top of the blanket where her delicate hand lay, struggling to keep his composure at hearing such a cry from his wife. "Fine. I promise," he said.

But he was lying.

* * *

"Nitric acid. Sulfur. Iron," he muttered, bustling about in his hidden office. "Thyme. A pinch of pure silver."

Concealed behind a bookshelf magically charmed to be unable to move unless by his wand, his office contained some of the rarest substances known to mankind. It had every piece of alchemy that Nicolas had collected over the past seven years, but most importantly, the place was simply bursting at the walls with knowledge.

Beautiful knowledge, he liked to note. And this beautiful knowledge was going to help him cure Perenelle.

Nicolas was rushing to grab yet another vial from a shelf when he stopped himself in the middle of his tracks. "Oh, woe," he muttered. "What am I doing?"

He stuffed his hand in the pocket of his alchemist robes and pulled out his yew wand. "_Accio silver."_

A glass phial darted from the line it was in and shot up into his hand. "Much better," Nicolas commented under his breath.

He set the silver next to the growing group of ingredients he'd be using, and stepped back whilst regarding the vials.

Following his talk with Perenelle, he had immediately rushed to his office and shut the door behind him so his wife would not detect any noises from the room. Nicolas had rifled through his handwritten books until he had found two pages that would hopefully be enough to serve his purpose.

The pages were in his hand at the moment, and they held countless symbols and drawings only he could understand. The lines were mostly jumbled and incoherent, but if by some miracle, the recipes worked… Well, he'd never wanted anything more in his life than for his plan to succeed.

After confirming that there were exactly 65 vials of ingredients, Nicolas gripped his wand and lit the fire below his cauldron. Carefully charming his spectacles to protect his face, he grabbed thyme from its position on the table and uncorked the vial.

He felt the familiar rush of exhilaration and anticipation that no one but his fellow alchemists could be able to understand, and smiled despite the situation.

His plan was going to work. There was no other option. It was going to work.

* * *

His plan didn't work.

He discovered that two mornings later while in the midst of a panic attack (their neighbor, bless his soul, had just died and was being taken away). Immediately, he rushed to Perenelle to tell her the news, but she was fast asleep and he hadn't wanted to wake her.

Just as he was about to leave the room, Perenelle made a small noise in her sleep. As Nicolas turned to check to see if she was alright, her hand shifted and peeked out from under the covers.

Nicolas had only a brief glance of her fingertips before he was rushing back to her side and saying, "Oh, gods, oh, Merlin, oh, _gods_," over and over, because he hadn't imagined it, and it wasn't a hallucination designed to strangle his heart - it was real and it was true, and Perenelle's hand was turning black.

"Oh, gods," he had whispered, disregarding the fact that he was touching her plagued fingers. "Oh, gods, no. No, Perenelle, oh, _gods_!"

She hadn't wakened through his pained murmurings, which he found to be relieving, because there was simply no way that she could know that the Black Death was turning the skin on her fingertips a deep, emotionless black, and Nicolas already decided he was not going to tell her. After all, if his alchemy worked, she would need not to know that she was slowly nearing her doomsday.

The thought had chilled him to the bone, so he pushed it away and locked it up in the dark confinements of his brain.

At that note, Nicolas had gently placed Perenelle's hand under the covers, and, after smoothing her hair down and putting a cool, wet cloth on her forehead, he had run off to his office, reminded that the alchemy should be completed, if done correctly.

He'd banged into his lab which had been locked for the past two days, and, forgetting to put his coat on in his hurry, rushed to his cauldron. The fire had died out in its own accord, and there did not seem to be anything inside the cauldron.

Nicolas grimly stared at the dark bottom of the cauldron. If the alchemy had gone right, there should have been a clear liquid at the bottom, a clear liquid that would have the remarkable ability to heal Perenelle's buboes and cure her of the plague.

But there was no clear liquid, and in their room lay Perenelle with black skin on her fingers and buboes marring her neck, arms, and thighs.

With a strangled sort of gasp, Nicolas thrusted his hand out and into the black, black cauldron and desperately groped around. Why this one time? Why did alchemy had to fail him the one time it mattered most?

"Pere-"

His breath caught. Nicolas's fingers grasped at the bottom of the cauldron, but instead of thin air, picked up a small, hard object too smooth and too rough, and too hot and too cold, to be anything familiar.

He clutched the object in his hand and drew his arm out of the cauldron. Opening his fist, he lifted the object into the light.

He didn't recognize it at first. It only seemed vaguely familiar in some aspect, until he turned it with his fingers and the beams of light struck the surface of the glassy object, illuminating it to be a dark, blood-red colour.

"Oh, Merlin's beard," he let out, barely emitting a whisper. Nicolas's arm shook and he collapsed onto the ground in shock.

The Philosopher's stone glinted and shone into his disbelieving eyes.

* * *

Perenelle could never fail to amaze Nicolas, no matter how many years they'd spent together at Beauxbatons and beyond. She was hands-down the strongest woman he'd ever met - he wagered that she was stronger than himself, though he'd not admit it if he could avoid doing so - and her ability to stand up to him on her sickbed was a testament to that.

"Absolutely not." The sight of the stone had entranced her for the first couple of seconds, but when she'd realized what he intended to do with it, she immediately recoiled.

Nicolas wasn't fazed by her determined resolve. "Perenelle, love, don't you see? It's better than anything I could imagine! This is a scientific discovery! This is an alchemist's dream! And this is more than I'd even tried to make! I read over the formulas I'd combined, and realized I had used one stem too much of thyme, and that one stem... It turned into this. It's a sign, love. It's meant to be!"

She started to protest, but he shook his head and motioned for her to wait.

"Perenelle, this is something that shall go down in history as one of the greatest achievements of all times!" He held up the stone with his index finger and thumb. His line of eyesight slowly shifted from the glassy surface of the stone to her pale, sickly face. "And," he said quietly, "it will heal you."

"What about the people who are dying, Nicolas? What about them?" Perenelle's blue eyes flashed angrily at him, and he briefly wondered how someone who looked so diseased could have such willpower as she did.

"_You're _dying, Perenelle."

"It's - it's not _fair _to them!" she protested. Perenelle's hand twitched as she sighed and said, "Nicolas… I am proud of what you've done. I've lived with you long enough to know that the Philosopher's stone is every alchemist's dream. But it's not right. Every other person in this continent that is plagued with the disease - how are they supposed to live? How are their loved ones going to cope with their deaths?"

"I can't lose you."

"They're going to lose their lovers and family."

"I'd rather die than live without you."

"Don't say that," she whispered bitingly at him. "Don't say that. Gods, don't you dare say that, Nick."

He reached out a hand to touch her blistering hot face, and she leaned against his calluses. "What will happen if you die on me?" he murmured.

"You're a wizard, love. You can use your magic to get away from this hell." Her voice was steady and unrelenting.

"Not without you. I'd rather die."

Perenelle turned her face away from his. "I told you not to say that."

"Why not? It's true."

"Because I say so, Nicolas!" He bit his lip in surprise at her harshness. She met his eyes with an icy glare. "Because I am telling you to live even if I die, and it's a command, and…" She trailed off, a tear rolling down her cheek. "And you're going to obey it no matter what happens, because I want you to _live, _Nick. If I'm going to die… I'd rather die knowing you live."

Nicolas caught her tear with his thumb and wiped it away. Leaning forward, he planted a gentle kiss on her sweaty forehead. "We can both live, then," he said quietly, "using the stone."

Perenelle glanced up at him. "It's unfair."

"Yes. But we can live."

"It's unfair," she repeated, but this time, it was weaker. "It's unfair. And," she added softly, "and I'm… scared."

Nicolas paused. "Of the stone?"

"It's unnatural. It's - it's _strange_."

Though he did not have the same views of the stone as she did - it was his creation, after all - Nicolas understood why she was wary of the the brooding power it contained in its glassy little form.

"We're going to share it. It will be alright."

Perenelle vacantly stared at a spot on the wall. "How long are we going to live?" she finally asked. "For eternity?"

Nicolas breathed heavily. Of course, in all the myths and legends, the Philosopher's stone was supposed to lead to immortality, and, presuming that sharing the stone would not affect its abilities, they _would _live on for forever.

But it did not feel fitting to tell Perenelle that, so he didn't.

"We'll live long," Nicolas promised her, fingering the powerful stone in his hand. "We'll live long for all the people who are affected by this treacherous disease."

And for more than six hundred years, they did.

* * *

**How was that? I really hope you all enjoyed this as much as I did writing it :) And that sounds super cheesy, but oh well xD**


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